On some systems that have shared libraries (which most
systems do) you need to tell your system how to find the newly
installed shared libraries. The systems on which this is
not necessary include
BSD/OS, FreeBSD, HP-UX, IRIX, Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Tru64
UNIX (formerly Digital
UNIX), and Solaris.

The method to set the shared library search path varies
between platforms, but the most widely usable method is to set
the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH
like so: In Bourne shells (sh,
ksh, bash,
zsh)

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/lib
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

or in csh or tcsh

setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /usr/local/pgsql/lib

Replace /usr/local/pgsql/lib with
whatever you set --libdir to in step 1. You should put
these commands into a shell start-up file such as /etc/profile or ~/.bash_profile. Some good information about
the caveats associated with this method can be found at
http://www.visi.com/~barr/ldpath.html.

On some systems it might be preferable to set the
environment variable LD_RUN_PATHbefore building.

On Cygwin, put the library
directory in the PATH or move the
.dll files into the bin directory.

If in doubt, refer to the manual pages of your system
(perhaps ld.so or rld). If you later on get a message like

If you are on
BSD/OS, Linux, or SunOS
4 and you have root access you can run

/sbin/ldconfig /usr/local/pgsql/lib

(or equivalent directory) after installation to enable the
run-time linker to find the shared libraries faster. Refer to
the manual page of ldconfig for more
information. On FreeBSD,
NetBSD, and OpenBSD the command is

If you installed into /usr/local/pgsql or some other location that is
not searched for programs by default, you should add /usr/local/pgsql/bin (or whatever you set
--bindir to in
step 1) into
your PATH. Strictly speaking, this is
not necessary, but it will make the use of PostgreSQL much more convenient.

To do this, add the following to your shell start-up file,
such as ~/.bash_profile (or
/etc/profile, if you want it to
affect every user):

PATH=/usr/local/pgsql/bin:$PATH
export PATH

If you are using csh or tcsh, then use this command:

set path = ( /usr/local/pgsql/bin $path )

To enable your system
to find the man documentation,
you need to add lines like the following to a shell start-up
file unless you installed into a location that is searched by
default.

MANPATH=/usr/local/pgsql/man:$MANPATH
export MANPATH

The environment variables PGHOST and
PGPORT specify to client applications
the host and port of the database server, overriding the
compiled-in defaults. If you are going to run client
applications remotely then it is convenient if every user that
plans to use the database sets PGHOST.
This is not required, however: the settings can be communicated
via command line options to most client programs.